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Privilege Feats

I’ve said something like this before, but I was thinking about it this morning.

This is just my perspective, but I think of sorts of privilege as being like initial feats your character has. You don’t choose these feats–they are assigned to you and operate whether you want them to or not.
(Though you could in theory take actions later in the game to modify how they operate, more on that later.)

All of them have different effects, and some are more broadly useful than others.

Having the “white” feat is almost always to your benefit, except in certain situations (wandering through a street in a black neighborhood late at night, trying to discuss racial issues with a room full of POCs, hiking in the mountains of Afghanistan or Iraq, etc). As with “straight” and “male,” it’s a pretty great, extremely OP feat that is almost always useful. (Possibly the only more OP feat is the relatively rare “Wealth” feat.)

If, on the other hand, you have say the “black” feat or the “gay” feat, it is of much more limited utility, and you run into significantly more situations where it either doesn’t help or actively injures you. Worse still if you have a bunch of underpowered feats, like a “POC” feat, “female,” “trans,” etc, which have a chaining effect. Your character’s going to run into a lot of issues in the adventure.

As I said above, you can’t modify what feats you start with. You’re born white, you have the white feat. You’re born gay, you have the gay feat. You may be able to hide one or more of your feats (particularly the “not-straight” family of feats or “trans,” “NB,” “genderqueer,” etc), but over the long term that hinders your character quite dramatically.

You can take additional feats and skill trainings to modify how these feats operate, however. You could take the “ally” feat (which is more complicated than one might think before taking the feat) or the “feminist” feat (whose prereqs are easier if you have the “woman” feat, but doable for all). If you have skill training in Diplomacy and Empathy, then your “white” feat can be put to good use, and you might be able to take the “wealth” feat at some point despite not having the “white” feat, but it’s really, REALLY hard to get (mostly because other people with the “white” and “wealth” feats actively discourage you from getting it).

Anyway. If you’re trying to wrap your head around privilege, that might be a useful way to look at it. 🙂